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The Phenomenology of the German People’s Body (Volkskörper) and the Extermination of the Jewish Body
Boaz Neumann
This essay examines Nazi body politics by focusing on that body which the Nazis themselves positioned at the center of their Weltanschauung, the German Volkskörper.
It was the Volkskörper, not individual bodies, which formed the corporeal ontology in the Nazi Weltanschauung by which both “worthy” and “unworthy” individual bodies were defined and by which policies of cultivation and enhancement, on the one hand, or neglect, removal, and extermination, on the other, were determined.
The Volkskörper was an actual, concrete body. Yet this was how the Nazis themselves understood, and experienced it. The very manifestation of the Volkskörper in the Nazi Weltanschauung was what actually exposed the Jew as a body, and as a Fremdkörper, one that either lived in a parasitic relationship among the Volkskörper or actually penetrated into it.
But the true Jewish problem, as the Nazis understood it, was not born of the Jewish status as a Fremdkörper, that is, as an other. The Jewish problem, rather, issued from the very loss of otherness. By subterfuge, camouflage, and disguise the Jewish body masked itself and consequently infiltrated the Volkskörper, where it thrived.
Historiography of the German Volkskörper in the Nazi Weltanschauung
In opposition to those interpretive traditions I have surveyed here that identify the Nazi version of the Volkskörper as an expression of “something else” (a metaphorical expression of the body; a mythic expression of the body; or an organic expression of state, society, and population), I believe the Volkskörper in the Nazi Weltanschauung be viewed as the manifestation of an actual, concrete body.
The Nazis themselves understood and experienced this body in such a way, in philosophy, politics, literature, the plastic arts, and stadium displays. Adolf Hitler and members of the party elite, Nazi philosophers, anthropologists, and experts in numerous other fields of inquiry, as well as the “man in the street”—all reported on their concrete experience of this body.
The horrible fate that awaited the Jewish body was a function of its parasitical relationship to or violation of, the Volkskörper. And since the fate of this Jewish body was a real one, it follows that the Volkskörper was no less real. If the Jewish Fremdkörper was not a metaphor—and, indeed, the Nazis treated this body in distinctly nonmetaphorical fashion—then why do we assume that the Volkskörper was essentially symbolic?
Even if we insist on the symbolic or metaphorical or mythic expression of the Volkskörper in the Nazi Weltanschauung, this has no effect on the argument I am making. More important than determining if the Volkskörper was a metaphorical or a concrete body is the effect this body had. One can continue to argue that the Volkskörper is “nothing but” a symbol or a metaphor.
But a metaphor often finds practical expression in the real world. In the present context, this was a most deadly expression. Even if the Volkskörper is “nothing but” a word or a concept, then it would appear that life and death were truly matters of language in the Nazi world.
In a phenomenological approach that examines the Volkskörper as it manifested itself in that world, it makes little difference if we are talking about a word or about the thing itself. It certainly made no difference in relation to the other bodies manifested in relation to the Volkskörper.
The Phenomenology of the German Volkskörper in the Nazi Weltanschauung
I assume that the Volkskörper in the Nazi Weltanschauung is exactly what it was, no more, no less: the body of a Volk with a life of its own that had suffered mortal injuries as a result of World War I, the rise of the Weimar Republic, and modern degeneracy in general. This Volkskörper then recovered and was even born again through the Nazi revolution.
The Nazi corporeal ontology did not rest on the individual’s body, since such a body was vulnerable to biological “whim.” The individual body was one that invariably decayed. The Nazi corporeal ontology was based, instead, on a body that did not degenerate. This was the Volkskörper, whose existence was autonomous of this or that specific body.
The republic’s history was, in fact, the history of a struggle between Marxism and the Volk:
The German Volk is splitting more and more into two opposed camps of mortal enemies. These are increasingly closing themselves off one from the other, changing into self-contained, self-sufficient Körper. Of these two, one, the Marxist, as a foreign body within one’s own Volk, repudiates all ties to the nation.
In 1932, in the depths of recession, Hitler declared that “all of the functions of this Volkskörper should ultimately fulfill only one purpose: securing the preservation of this Volkskörper in the future."
The Volkskörper was victimized not just by the Weimar Republic, but had been profoundly damaged in the war and its immediate aftermath as well. The physical injury done to the German body was unprecedented. The number of military casualties was placed between 4.2 and 4.5 million.
During and after the war, physicians treated about nineteen million wounds and injuries, a high percentage of them disfiguring: 24.7 percent were combat wounds, while 13.4 percent derived from dermatological disease and 6.8 percent from orthopedic disorders.
Eighty thousand German soldiers lost limbs during the war. Twenty-five thousand lost one or both arms; fifty-five thousand, one or both legs. These figures should then be augmented by the unprecedented number of soldiers who died, 1.8 million.
This disastrous physical trauma to the German body was expressed not just in the quantity and quality of the injuries but in other physical experiences as well. Thus, for instance, the discharged corporal Hitler testified: “I learnt to hate rats when I was at the front. A wounded man forsaken between the lines knew he’d be eaten alive by these disgusting beasts.”
The Körper is the body of an individual with no existence outside its own skin. The Leib, in contrast, is a part of the Volksleib. Hence:
The citizen [Staatsbürger] has a Körper at his disposal, with which he can do what he so desires. Since the citizen is defined overall by the institution of private property, treating everything according to its pattern, he also accepts his Körper as private property. By contrast, the member of the Volk [Volksbürger] knows that through his Leib he is bound up with the total Leib [corpus] of his Volk.
The Leib allowed the Nazis, to transcend the individual Körper in favor of the Volksleib. It was now possible for them to draw an analogy between the individual Leib and the general Volksleib. Just as every organ and limb belong to an individual’s Leib, every body was a constituent part of the Volksleib:
When the hand is separated from the Leib, then it is no longer a limb, but a dead Körper. And when the Leib separates off from the Leib of the totality, then it is no longer a Leib but merely an isolated Körper. Thus the individual is only a dead Körper, separating itself off from the living Leib of his Volk.
The “culture of the Körper” is devoid of any principle of community and is thus bereft of vitality: because when fifty people tend to their Körper, each to his own, this does not constitute a life in community—it is individualism in the form of the herd.
If the Volkskörper was a wounded body, then the Volk’s leaders were physicians. It was critically important that they understand the “inner processes” of this body. “Like the physician, the statesman must observe and influence the rising of the humors and the circulation of the limbs in the organism that he wishes to treat.”
Given the threat of invasion by foreign bodies, it was little wonder that one of the Nazis’ first steps after assuming power was to thwart this invasion. In early 1933 they initiated legislation for “the first and most coarse cleansing of our Volkskörper, sealing it off from the outside to protect it from the influx of those with inferior genetic material [Erbminderwertiger].”
The Nazis also turned mass sporting events into collective demonstrations for producing and reproducing the Volksgemeinschaft through its public manifestation. The stadium became the site of the Nazi sociopolitical act that organized and integrated the assembly of individual bodies into a single organic body. Hitler thus considered the stadium a place where the Volkskörper was “toughened and steeled:”
A festival without athletics is like a house without a foundation. All the power of a Volk, mentally, intellectually, politically and culturally, rests, like the roots of a tree, in the bodies [Leiber] of its members. The völkisch state places the Volksleib at the very heart and center of its Volk festivals and calls for “culture of the Leib,” not for “culture of the Körper,” as was done in times past. The festivals are milestones in the life of the Volk; in them, historical memories wed with current political action.
The birth of the Volkskörper in the stadium was not the kind of birth in which one first sees the light of day. It was to be compared, rather, with that moment when one first achieves self-consciousness through one’s self-manifestation:
Thus the Volk grows on; it grows and will not stop. Only now is it becoming truly conscious of its organs; it feels its limbs, though these are still stiff, inflexible. The German Volkskörper is beginning to stretch; the Volk is setting out onto the march.
Perhaps these steps today are still a bit uncertain and unclear, since the Volk has only recently been reborn. We live at a stage of childhood, but this is the most felicitous of times. In its demonstrations, the Volk is jubilant as it cheers its Führer. It senses that its eyes have been opened. And that life has become conscious, wakeful, and alert.
An essential therapeutic role in treating the Volkskörper was, of course, reserved for the Führer. Hitler succeeded in rejuvenating this body after it was injured in the war:
The unknown soldier, like a magnet, brought together the shattered fragments of the Volk, the classes, parties and interest groups, melding them into an expressive Körper of magnificent rhythmicality. This whirling, teeming godless mass of human beings, seized by the frenzy of the sense of utility, pushed and pinned by avarice and egoism, was, at a historic hour, struck by a lightning bolt.
That bolt welded their atoms in the glowing white heat of a new and sublime message—the message of the community of the German Volk. That was the hour of birth of the Third Reich!
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